Proposal wouldn’t let California public officials earn more than the Governor

Saturday, June 2, 2018

As excerpted from The Press-Enterprise

The pressure to match competitors’ pay has contributed to more than 28,000 public executives in California bringing home more salary than the state’s governor, who makes $195,803 a year. That includes city managers — responsible for implementing elected officials’ policy decisions and running cities day-to-day — and many police and fire chiefs, heads of county departments and public university officials.

The portion of each of those salaries that exceeds the governor’s pay costs taxpayers $1.8 billion a year, said Assemblywoman Sabrina Cervantes, D-Riverside.

So she’s proposing a salary cap. If her proposal passes, no public executive would be allowed a base salary higher than the governor’s.

“The Governor of California is elected by the people to administer not only the world’s fifth largest economy, but a state of nearly 40 million individuals that is one of the most diverse and complicated polities on earth,” Cervantes said in an email. “It is illogical to allow other public executives, like unelected city managers, to make more in salary than the Governor. This is especially true of public executives who make more than twice what the Governor does.”